If you read the discussion, they weren't kept because of their encyclopedic value, or because they were "widespread". I'm not sure why the parent commenter said that.

They were kept to preserve a record of their having been uploaded, and to not create a legal risk for third parties who might be relying on the Commons page as their way to provide attribution.

The original proposal was to keep the image pages with the metadata, but delete the image files. That turned out to have some technical hurdles, so instead the images were overwritten with versions containing big ugly attribution messages, to discourage their use.

A valid question. These kinds of approaches are a pretty standard attack in the copyleft world. I don't know on what basis the community chooses forced-attribution vs deletion.

Marco Verch managed to get his stuff deleted: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests...

So it's a question of the execution of the operation really.

By the way, do you also have the same user handle on Reddit? I have the vaguest memory of you quoting someone else on the subject of denying a person suffering on the street drugs that went something to the effect of not wanting to do it because denying such a man drugs deny him his only escape from such reality or something of the sort.

I never did find that comment again, and it's been at the back of my mind for years (perhaps even a decade) and now I'm not even sure if I've asked you this before.

I don’t understand why this is sleazy TBH. It’s CC-BY-SA. If attribution isn’t provided it’s a valid case. I once uploaded a map of my state with all the districts in labels in English and my language Tamil to commons under CC-BY-SA. It was used left right and centre, from publications, map sellers to the point I can see them hanging in offices. It’s always pained me, nothing could be done about it. Now I didn’t want money, would have liked the recognition, but would have settled for just seeing the CC-BY-SA logo on it at the least.